Check out the new Web site for Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Please buy the new album, Cold Roses. I love Ryan Adams and I absolutely love this album. The song “Let It Ride” is fantastic.

The phenomenal Swedish pop band, The Shout Out Louds, returns to the Bowery Ballroom on June 8. I managed to catch them briefly in February and was totally surprised by how great they are live. And I suppose since The Dears are the headliner to this gig, there are going to be lots of sensitive souls in the audience.

Does anyone else find it odd that Natalie Imbruglia‘s latest song is titled “Shiver”? Am I the only one who remembers Chris Martin saying in a BBC Radio 1 interview many moons ago that the source of inspiration for Coldplay‘s song “Shiver,” off their debut album Parachutes, was Natalie Imbruglia? Chris said something about being a lonely sad student and sitting at home watching the Aussie soap “Neighbors.” He said he had a huge crush on Imbruglia, who starred on the show, and wrote “Shiver” based on some remote feelings for her–a girl he would never ever meet or have contact with, even though he felt like he fancied her quite a bit.

Er…did I seem like a creepy Coldplay fan just there? Sorry about that, but it’s the perfect lead-in to my next item…

Coldplay are taking over NYC next week! The lovely British lads are dishing themselves out to ever huge conglomerate they can and doing shows for VH1 (Monday), AOL (Tuesday), MTV (Wednesday), NBC–for SNL…and playing a record 5 songs!!! (Saturday). I would love to somehow work my way in to the Monday gig. If you have the means, PLEASE LET ME KNOW by e-mailing coldplay4eva @ themodernage.org. I’m a huge huge CP fan…so much so that I actually call them “CP” in real life.

Here’s a picture from the first time I ever saw Coldplay in 2001 at Brixton Academy in London. It was the last date of their UK tour. I remember I was so pissed off that year because during the start of the year Coldplay toured the US for the first time ever, playing shows at Irving and Roseland, but I was studying abroad in London at the time, so I missed all of them.

JUNE 2001

Here’s a picture of Chris signing autographs after CP’s Radio City Music Hall gig. It was the last night of their US tour. Grandaddy, the supporting act were totally drunk and throwing stuff out of their dressing room windows onto the people standing by the sidewalk.

DECEMBER 2001

CP did a great “intimate-ish” gig at Irving Plaza. JJ72 were the openers. They did two nights. One of these nights was also the first time I met two of the boys that would go on to be Surefire.

AUGUST 2002

“MAKE TRADE FAIR” pimping hits NYC for the first time. Coldplay’s amazing gig at Bowery Ballroom. Future wife Gwyneth Paltrow was in the audience, sitting in the balcony, and when Chris sang “In My Place,” he sang it in her direction. It was like Romeo and Juliet. I think everyone vomited internally. Noel and Liam Gallagher were also in the audience and were in a jovial mood. Chris did a cover of one of their songs.

In their first proper interview of 2004, The White Stripes talk to the Observer about their formerly friendly Detroit comrads, why they dislike America, and why they just might move away from their hometown.

Jack on Jim Diamond: “Some people, you realise that they’re looking at it differently than you’re looking at it. Fame and money, that is. That can only fall on their own heads in the end, not us. Because we love everybody, and if you’re not out to hurt anybody, then you won’t get hurt in the end.”

Jack on Jason Stollsteimer: “He pulled a contact lens out of his eye that he’d left in for a year, and he’s trying to blame me for it. Such a manipulator! I really feel sorry for the people in that band. You don’t know what it’s like being on tour with a band, and they’re all complaining and crying. That guy is a provoker, a really bad person, but the way I see it, the more I talk about it, the more he gets what he wants.”

Andrew Perry RE: talking to Jack about Renée: Their publicist warned me that Jack would almost certainly terminate the interview at any mention of his relationship with Hollywood actress Renée Zellweger, which is ongoing and steady, by all accounts bar tabloid ones.

Jack on the American music landscape: “What do we have? Ashlee Simpson instead of Patti Page! I mean, look at those people – like Paris Hilton! Who are all these skanks, man? Little girls are looking up to these girls, and it’s so gross. Those girls have no dignity at all, and parents are letting their kids dress up like those skanks. But what else have they got? What are the other choices? Oh well, ha ha ha [laughing angrily at the folly]! Somebody had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to play guitar on Lindsay Lyons’s [sic] album! Ha ha ha! She’s another one of those 16-year-old actresses, and she’s making an album! Like, ‘NO!’ Ha ha ha!”

Meg on American politics: “It’s a rough time. I haven’t seen people be so obsessed and upset in my lifetime – you know, about everything. My dad always told me, they should always have a third choice on the ballot, like ‘none of the above’, then if enough people picked that, they’d have to get new candidates.”

Jack on Detroit: “I don’t yearn for this town any more. It’s so decrepit, and the government’s so corrupt, and it’s getting in my way more than helping me. It’s hard to be comfortable any more. What I used to love about it was, we could play drums on the front lawn and the cops wouldn’t even show up, but now I don’t care any more about that. I don’t wanna play on the front lawn any more.”

Jack on whether or not he’d move away from The D: “I might, actually. There are plenty of places prettier than this place, maybe down south. That’s the real America, I think. That’s the last bastion of culture in the country, where people really have American culture. There’s parts of Appalachia that still maintain those mountain songs, those feelings that convey Americana. I don’t think you can get that in any major city ever again. It’s gone forever. I read old books about Detroit from the Twenties and Thirties, and it was such a beautiful city, but it’s been destroyed. You think how wonderful it could’ve been if it had just stayed that way.”

Jack on quitting smoking: “My voice was getting really really bad. I was losing all the high end. I’d heard some old tapes of us play, and I was really disappointed in the way I couldn’t hit these notes anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t wanna stop.”

Jack on working with Beck: “I was just working with Beck a couple of months back. It’s this song where I played bass and he played Fender Rhodes on it. We just started working on it. He had the Dust Brothers producing on it, and the studio wasn’t really for me – it was just like, a computer. They know what they’re doing, they’re really good at what they do. Beck sent me the song not too long ago, and he’s done some really cool things with it after I left. “

Holy CRAP! Jack sure packs a mean punch! Images taken of Jason Stollsteimer after being released from Detroit Receiving Hospital reveal the kind of ass-kicking Jack is capable of. This is all getting a little bit too Tommy and Pam for us. No one from the White Stripe camp has called out the “publicity for my new album” card yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some backlash comes about from this. Wonder how Ryan Adams feels to be no longer the concentrated source of Jack White’s wrath. Luckily Ryan was smart enough to stay arms length from Jack “The Jabber” White. Dear Jesus! We can help but feel that we have played some horrible part in re-igniting this rivalry… We know how jealous Jack gets when we start gagging over other bands from Detroit that aren’t the White Stripes or Whirlwind Heat… but even we think he’s gone a bit too far this time. Hey, come to think of it, Jack punched out David Swanson’s front tooth the same night we saw them in San Diego… hmmm… Unbelievable linkage from Whatevs.

Statement from the Von Bondies Management:

Stollsteimer was violently attacked by Jack White of the White Stripes without warning or provocation. White approached Stollsteimer during the concert, physically forcing him against the speakers, and began shouting. Stollsteimer attempted to turn his head [to] face White but refused to engage in conversation. Visibly angered by Stollsteimer’s unwillingness to argue or fight, White spat into Stollsteimer’s face and punched him in the head and face repeatedly. White then forced Stollsteimer to the ground and continued his attack until White was restrained by several crowd members.

Only towards the end did security stomp through the crowd and remove just 1 of the idiots. One poor girl had to be taken out of the crowd she was so banged up. Then during the encore, Jack announces they got 1 song left for us – It’s Boll Weevil.

They begin – and the crowd surfing has started to pick up. Jack tells Meg to stop. He says “We’ll just wait until this guy finishes (referring to a crowd surfer)”. Then he goes “So Everyone get their teenage angst out tonight?????!!!!!!” Of course he was being sarcastic but the idiots didn’t realize it. Bollweevil resumes. Then during a solo, that’s it. Jack has had enough. He throws down his guitar and leans over the stage and starts screaming at a crowd surfer. He gets back to Mic:

“I am sick of these Frat Fuckers crashing our gig! People are just trying to have a good time, not have some Asshole crash down on their neck!!!” He takes a breath. “And now the last verse, which is about myself”. And the show ends smoothly.

We really need to do a write-up of the White Stripes and Sondre Lerche show(s) we saw… but we’re very lazy.

But we do have the time to say that New York hates Whirlwind Heat. The only applause they garner from the NY audience is when they say “coming up next, The White Stripes” and when David Swanson announces, “This is our last song.” So sad for us… seeing how we’re the only people on the East Coast who like them. That said, we can’t really blame anyone for hating Whirlwind Heat… their live set *can* get a bit tedious and… irritating if you’re not into the music. And it’s not like they’re going out trying to be super-accessible to a cranky post-Autolux crowd.

The first night WH wore some t-shirt we’d never seen before… a black and white picture of a Japanese girl with white Japanese writing on the side. On the 20th they wore white Terry Richardson shirts (someone said they might have spied him in the audience?). That pervy Richardson + WH image was projected in back of them. Needless to say, the crowd wasn’t having any of it and booed them both nights.